To the young, I would whisper, "The Bible is a myth." I would convince them that man created God instead of the other way around. I would confide that what is bad is good, and what is good is "square".
Ping!
I climb on my road bike and ride for an hour plus four mornings a week, longer on Saturdays. Hardly “religion”. It’s simply to balance the fact that I do nothing physical the rest of the day.
I didn’t realize all those mornings in the army when we rolled out of the rack for PT that constituted a religious experience. Leaves me a bit concerned...because of the two possible alternatives, it certainly didn’t strike me as heaven.
The last 2 paragraphs seem to reflect the state of SOME churches...and why people may have turned to the groups
Secularists have turned physical fitness into a god.
EXODUS 20 (TEN COMMANDMENTS
You shall have no other gods before me.
You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below.
You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me,
but showing love to a thousand generations of those who love me and keep my commandments.
I have a couple of friends who are part of a Crossfit-like program at a local gym. You pay, you agree to sign over your social media accounts to advertise for their program. You sign a contract to lose a certain amount of weight or you forfeit your deposit etc.
And so, like clockwork, they post pictures of everything they’re doing at the gym. It’s almost all they post on FB. As if each exercise is a transcendental experience. Adding more weight or different exercises is akin to leveling up in Scientology. It’s a cult.
“It was over a month before anyone from my parish returned my call.”
How much time does this work out junkie spend with her church family. Her parish was probably trying to figure out just who she is, that is if her statement wasn’t a lie. I know my church family is all over a chance to help out.
Her gym family is her church family, and church is just a place she goes on Sunday morning, again, that is if she even goes.
I work at a radio station where the programming director has been going to Crossfit for 4-6 months. He’s always talking about it: his 5am workouts, his eating, his friends at Xfit, I think it’s his raison d’etre. He also goes to church, has a wife and child, but he talks more about xfit than any other topic.
There are atheist “churches”, too.
The North Texas Church of Freethought has been running for a decade or more.
The “Sunday Assembly” is a modern and more popular incarnation, though it has already schismed with “The Godless Revival”. No joke, it was in Huffington Post in 2014.
So even secular atheist churches have the same denomination splits protestants do, while mocking the strict doctrinal standards - and enjoying the strong social network religion typically provides.